June was a mega busy month for our Midlands technology public relations agency. We worked on something a bit different this month.  We PR’d the launch of  Aldridge Prime, a new development of work and living space. A launch event for local businesses and residents attracted lots of attention and media coverage including one front cover and newspaper articles in all relevant local media.  I’ve never been in a court house, so that was fun as the development is going to refurbish and redevelop the old courts in Aldridge.

For our enterprise tech clients, we got two of our clients into this month’s Information Age magazine and the launch of the new test automation factory was picked up widely. We supported a launch of a new package to help systems integrators and enterprises put ERP onto mobile devices with articles in Techworld, CBR and Computerworlduk.

Reviews of computing kit that we have managed for our leading technology retail client, including laptops and all in one PCs have appeared in Trusted Reviews, What Laptop, CNET and PC Pro.

And as if that’s not enough, our hosted voip client has received a lot of attention due to the possibility of  an upcoming BT strike, which actually has just been called off!

We asked Nadine, who looks after our admin, to write about what she’s been up to this month.

“This month has been a very busy one for our PR agency with the addition of several new clients.  But with it has brought the opportunity to learn new skills, including things I never thought possible without years dedicated to IT Courses!

This month I have set up a Facebook page and researched how to maximise the effect of social networking in business to communicate with potential consumers; how to schedule Tweets and look at the efficacy of the links we have posted up; and amazingly I have learnt CODING!! Something I never expected to include in my personal skill set.

New jobs also require old skills too and I have started monitoring the online coverage generated by Vitis PR for our new clients; began researching lists of relevant media personnel to contact on behalf of our clients; proofread press releases; uploaded press releases to websites and managed the process to pick up products from journalists that have reviewed our clients’ products.

It’s always exciting to have new clients on board, learning about their business and sometimes finding new services you wondered how you ever lived without them!”

We work for a great small business VoIP company called Cloud Net. They provide plug and play internet telephones and switchboard.

We like the idea so much that we have switched our business phone system to theirs.

It’s already saving us money and is really easy to control online.

What’s more, there was no complicated installation or waiting in for installation engineers and they gave us free handsets thrown in.

We’ve taken more than one handset and our calls get automatically routed to whoever is free, our voicemails go to emails and they have a free conference line included. We just plugged the handsets into our router and then started making calls.

Another uber busy month has kept us away from the blog.

February started with a trip down to Farnborough to represent our embedded electronics consultancy client at the Southern Manfucturing and Electronics Show.  We met with 8 journalists during the day and picked up some great show preview coverage in Elektor, Design Products and Electronics among others.  We’ve been working with the Longbridge based team on PR activity to raise awareness of the company and also re-design their website and improve their SEO to drive more customers to them via the internet.  It was therefore great news to hear that they have won their biggest contract to date as a result of a Google Search.

Rather than work on our own blog, we’ve also been providing enterprise tech industry news analysis for one of our clients to include in their regular blogging activity.

Our consumer electronic product review work took me down to the new PC World and Currys combined store in Fulham to co-host consumer tech journalists while they checked out the latest range of touch screens from the likes of Acer, Sony, HP and Dell.

We also started working for Cloud Net, a business phone systems company based in Walsall.  They provide a full featured phone switchboard for the fraction of the price of hardware switchboards, and users get free handsets which saves even more money.  Their associate programme launch, appointment of new sales and marketing director and exhibition at the Business Growth Show certainly kept us busy.

It’s already March and hopefully, we’ll have a little more time to blog this month!

We’ve been working with a video company to produce some video content for news websites and get media and analysts’ questions answered in video format.  It’s great for the interviewer as their news story comes to life, and great for our clients as they get content they can spread virally which is more interesting than a standard update.

Here are links to a couple of the videos we pitched in, secured questions for, organised filming and supplied to Sales Pro in the UK and SMB Group in the US.

Yuuguu interview for SalesPro.co.uk

Yuuguu interview with SMB Group

Gosh end of the year already!  2009 has certainly been one of the most interesting and challenging years for our tech PR agency.

With client marketing budgets under pressure at the beginning of the year as the recession really began to bite, coupled with the growing interest and use of social media, we started to update the services that we provide to clients, so that we could ensure the best use of budget.

Our presence as a technology PR agency on search engines is certainly improving and that understanding is helping us to gain more clients and help our clients with basic SEO activity and helps us to guide our clients through the social media landscape.

Media coverage, both on and offline,  of course plays an important part in raising awareness of our clients’ products and services, so here’s a tiny weeny sample of the coverage we have generated for our clients this year:

1. Application platform company - Financial Times
2. Online security company – Financial Times, page 3 piece on online anonymity

3. Online security company – Sky TV

4. Web conferencing company – Daily Telegraph

5. Web conferencing company – BBC Click

6. Open source company – Computer Weekly

7. Management consultancy – Computing

8. Mobile marketing company – Data Strategy

9. Open source company – ZDNet

10. Regional IT project – Birmingham Post

It’s been such a busy two weeks that we haven’t been able to catch our breathe to CELEBRATE the fact that we won a Silver PR campaign award for our work with the ICT Cluster.  We won the award from the CIPR, which is the Chartered Institute for PR for the uninitiated.

It was a proud moment as this is the first campaign that we have entered for an award and to be in the finals was amazing but to get Silver really was the icing on the cake, especially as the competition was very tough.

The judges especially congratulated us for the use of social media to reach SMEs within the West Midlands region.  For the ICT Cluster we manage the Twitter feed and the Linkedin pages, provide and upload content to their website, produce the newsletter and also implement traditional and online PR.

We’re definitely proud of our achievement.

It’s been another interesting month for our tech PR agency.

I wanted to share just a few pieces of media coverage we have generated for our clients in October, so you get an idea of what we can achieve. It’s hard to put the list in order as the stories mean different things to different clients and we can’t put everything here, so here are some of the ones we are most proud of:

1. Yuuguu review on BBC’s flagship consumer technology programme - BBC Click

2. credativ on Windows 7 and open source – Computer Weekly

3. Magic Software migrating 60 banking applications easily and effectively for international Bank Leumi – Banking Technology

4. ByteSnap Design releasing a new Windows CE user interface design tool – Windowsfordevices

5. Rapide Communication revealing new research on 75% of customer feedback being unread – Retail Bulletin

6. fg microtec partnering to provide their fixed mobile convergence client to Siemens – Enterprise VOIP Planet

The Rapide research story should be appearing in a tier one marketing magazine in November, so it’s getting exposure in front of the right people for the company.

We represented ByteSnap at the Embedded Systems Show in Farnborough in early October and their story on their new User Interface Tool has been run by some very good quality electronics publications and some with direct links back to ByteSnap’s website.  Google Analytics proves useful to understand which direct links from a publication’s website bring the most traffic.

As the month comes to a close, we are prepping for the biggest event in the Midlands ICT calendar – the ICT Cluster Conference and Awards – it’s all hands to the pump as we prepare press releases for shortlisted companies, organise publicity to encourage delegates to attend, arrange advertorials and get media interest for the event.

Anyway, November is again looking pretty busy, but as always we are up for a challenge!

Long time no blog.  September certainly has been a busy month.

We got shortlisted for the CIPR PRide award for our work for the ICT Cluster.  Our work is based on traditional media, social media and event support.

We have finished creating a new identity for an electronics design conusultancy and started PR work for them highlighting their presence at the Embedded systems conference next week.  Our client’s new website and PR activity is leading to an increase in the amount of search and direct traffic they receive. Actually, we are using SEO techniques that we are implementing on own own site to gain Google page one rankings for terms such as PR agency and technology PR agency.

We’ve also been working across the UK and US to announce the news of fg microtec providing its fixed mobile convergence client technology to Siemens.

Oh and we worked to launch open source consultancy credativ’s US office.

A bit of pro Bono for a friend working in a lab that helps develop vaccines and has just got some seriously significant funding was something different and made us all feel good.

Along with this we’ve been generating awareness for our clients through their work with customers, so it’s been a hectic September and we’re all feeling very positive about the rest of the year.

We’ve been really busy and Nadine, who does our admin is off at the mo, so we got a temp in…also called Nadine, a PhD holder who’s filling in time until she gets a job.

At the end of her first stint in a PR agency, we got her to summarise what she’s done for us, so if you’re thinking of going into PR admin, here’s what you may be expected to do.

Generally speaking, administrative assistants are responsible for a variety of administrative and clerical duties necessary to run an organisation efficiently. They serve as information and communication managers for an office; plan and schedule meetings and appointments; organise and maintain paper and electronic files; manage projects, conduct research, and disseminate information over the phone, email or websites.

At Vitis PR, I’ve been responsible for supporting the delivery of PR activity for the agency’s clients.

Specific tasks have been:

I have proof read written communication material, such as press releases, newspaper articles, and website copy.

I have provided feedback on design and content on a website the agency is working on and proof read the content that the team has been working on.

I have put together lists of companies that may be interested in a supplement that the PR agency is producing with a regional newspaper on behalf of a client.

I have created a site map in PowerPoint and also formatted competitor key words that the account team has put together.

It’s been an interesting and fast paced few days and it’s made me consider a career in PR.